 | |
| Author | Sarmila Bose |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | History |
| Publisher | C. Hurst & Co. |
Publication date | 1 April 2011 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
| Pages | 288 |
| ISBN | 978-1-84904-049-5 |
Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War is a controversial book on the Bangladesh Liberation War written by Sarmila Bose. [1] The book has been accused of flawed and biased methodology, historical negationism and downplaying genocide. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Bose aims for a revisionist reconstruction of the Bangladesh Liberation War in a chronological fashion using material evidence as well as public memory. [8] This was to counter the prevailing multitude of poor and partisan scholarship on the issue, and Bose claimed that hers will be a unique work for years. [8] [9] [10]
She notes the war to have had its origins in a xenophobic and communal expressions of Bengali nationalism. [11] Military operations by Pakistani Army were mostly political reprisals and started in response to provocations by Mujib's movement which engaged in violence despite Yahya Khan's efforts to restore democracy. [11] [6] In the process, Bose also seeks to prove that the death-count portrayed by Bangladesh is often unreliable and aimed at distorting the truth about the nature and number of war-crimes. [8]
Scholars have accused her of flawed reasoning, deep-rooted pro-Pakistani sentiment and biased methodology unsuitable any academic review of this nature as clear attempt at historical revisionism by cherry-picking sources, and downplaying recorded war crimes and ethnic cleansing.
Martin Woollacott, the foreign correspondent of The Guardian , found it to be a long-overdue study which exonerated the Pakistani Government of planning to rule Bangladesh (East Pakistan) by force and stood to provoke "fresh research and fresh thinking". [12] Atul Mishra, an assistant professor in international relations at the Central University of Gujarat, reviewing for Contemporary South Asia, found the work to be "soundly conceptualized and professional", and an ideal read for doctoral students. [13]
The book was subject to positive reception in Pakistan for its rare favorable portrayal. [14]
Pakistani book authors and media journalists meanwhile have also published their own works challenging the allegations of the Bangladeshi government on the events of the 1971 war. [15] [16] [17]
Chaity Das, reviewing over Journal of South Asian Development, found the book to be an exercise in "glossy revisionism"; failing to see beyond the number of casualties, Bose engaged in an opportunistic and inconsistent pitting of memory against memory to discredit the narratives of victims and exonerate the Pakistan Army. [18] Arnold Zeitlin, a journalist who had covered the '71 war, argued the monograph to be a "distortion of history" that carried the author's prejudices and had an idiosyncratic emphasis upon getting an accurate number of casualties, whilst refusing to tackle the underlying themes and issues surrounding the event. [19] [20] Gita Sahgal, writing for The Daily Star, expressed similar concerns; lacking in any theoretical or political framework and engaging in a selective usage of sources, Bose only served to adulate the Pakistan Military. [21] Several issues — Jamaat-e-Islami, Al-Badr etc. — that would have proved inconvenient for her central thesis, were skipped. [21] Likewise, Jayanta Kumar Ray claims bias in Bose's extensive usage of pro-Pakistan sources and accuses her of getting "basic facts wrong" in counting of rapes. [22]
Urvashi Butalia, a feminist historian of memory, reviewing for Tehelka , noted the work to be spoiled by her "hubris and irrational biases"; Bose exonerated Pakistani officers of mass-rape and wanton violence by taking their accounts as "straightforward" truth but labeled all Bangladeshi accounts as "claims". [9] A review in The Hindu found the book to have created a moral equivalence between the oppressors and oppressed — her work had evident bias in the manner she conducted much rigorous interviews of relevant Bangladeshi figures than their Pakistani counterparts and deemed the ethnic attitude of Bengalis to lie at the root of all issues. [10] Nayanika Mookherjee, a social anthropologist studying memories of '71 wartime rapes, found the book to be methodologically inconsistent, informed by a disdain for Bangladeshi Self Determination — to Bose, Bangladeshis were guided by blind hate against the "fine men" of Pakistan army who had "no ethnic bias" and they either exhibited "bestial" violence or were "cowards". [23] She also criticizes Bose for failing to cite post-nationalist scholarship in vernacular, which discussed the role of Bengali Muslims in killing Bihari/non-Bengali collaborators and communities. [23]
Srinath Raghavan, an Indian historian of contemporary history, reviewing for The Indian Express characterized Bose's work to be a "disturbing misrepresentation of the 1971 war" — "it [was] impossible to review the entire catalogue of evasions, obfuscations, omissions and methodological errors". [11] [3] [24] [25]
Bose has responded to Naeem Mohaiemen and others in The Economic and Political Weekly. [4] She maintains that her research is unbiased and the critics were only "those who [had] profited for so long from mythologizing the history of 1971." [8] [4]
East Pakistan was the eastern province of Pakistan between 1955 and 1971, restructured and renamed from the province of East Bengal and covering the territory of the modern country of Bangladesh. Its land borders were with India and Burma, with a coastline on the Bay of Bengal. East Pakistanis were popularly known as "Pakistani Bengalis"; to distinguish this region from India's state West Bengal, East Pakistan was known as "Pakistani Bengal". In 1971, East Pakistan became the newly independent state Bangladesh, which means "country of Bengal" or "country of Bengalis" in Bengali language.
The Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, also known as the third India-Pakistan war, was a military confrontation between India and Pakistan that occurred during the Bangladesh Liberation War in East Pakistan from 3 December 1971 until the Pakistani capitulation in Dhaka on 16 December 1971. The war began with Pakistan's Operation Chengiz Khan, consisting of preemptive aerial strikes on eight Indian air stations. The strikes led to India declaring war on Pakistan, marking their entry into the war for East Pakistan's independence, on the side of Bengali nationalist forces. India's entry expanded the existing conflict with Indian and Pakistani forces engaging on both the eastern and western fronts. Thirteen days after the war started, India achieved a clear upper hand, and the Eastern Command of the Pakistan military signed the instrument of surrender on 16 December 1971 in Dhaka, marking the formation of East Pakistan as the new nation of Bangladesh. Approximately 93,000 Pakistani servicemen were taken prisoner by the Indian Army, which included 79,676 to 81,000 uniformed personnel of the Pakistan Armed Forces, including some Bengali soldiers who had remained loyal to Pakistan. The remaining 10,324 to 12,500 prisoners were civilians, either family members of the military personnel or collaborators (Razakars).
The Bangladesh Liberation War, also known as the Bangladesh War of Independence and known as the Liberation War in Bangladesh, was an armed conflict sparked by the rise of the Bengali nationalist and self-determination movement in East Pakistan, which resulted in the independence of Bangladesh. The war began when the Pakistani military junta based in West Pakistan—under the orders of Yahya Khan—launched Operation Searchlight against East Pakistanis on the night of 25 March 1971, initiating the Bangladesh genocide.
Dead reckoning is a process for estimating the value of a variable quantity by using a previous value and adding any changes.
Sarmila Bose is an Indian-American journalist, academic and lawyer. She has served as a senior research associate at the Centre for International Studies in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War, a controversial book on the Bangladesh Liberation War.
Razakar is etymologically an Arabic word which literally means volunteer. The word is also common in Urdu language as a loanword. On the other hand, in Bangladesh, razakar is a pejorative word meaning a traitor or Judas.
Neelima Ibrahim was a Bangladeshi educationist, littérateur and social worker. She is well known for her scholarship on Bengali literature but even more so for her depiction of raped and tortured women in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War in her book Ami Birangana Bolchi. She was awarded Bangla Academy Literary Award in 1969, Begum Rokeya Padak in 1996 and Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh for her contributions to Bangla literature.
The Bangladesh genocide was the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis, especially Bengali Hindus, residing in East Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War, perpetrated by the Pakistan Armed Forces and the Razakars. It began on 25 March 1971, as Operation Searchlight was launched by West Pakistan to militarily subdue the Bengali population of East Pakistan; the Bengalis comprised the demographic majority and had been calling for independence from the Pakistani state. Seeking to curtail the Bengali self-determination movement, erstwhile Pakistani president Yahya Khan approved a large-scale military deployment, and in the nine-month-long conflict that ensued, Pakistani soldiers and local pro-Pakistan militias killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women in a systematic campaign of mass murder and genocidal sexual violence. In their investigation of the genocide, the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists concluded that Pakistan's campaign involved the attempt to exterminate or forcibly remove a significant portion of the country's Hindu populace.
The Swadhin Bangla Biplobi Parishad was an armed underground student political group secretly organized in 1961 by Serajul Alam Khan, a key founder of Bangladesh, that worked to wage an armed secessionist struggle against Pakistani rule and achieve the independence of East Pakistan as "Bangladesh".
Shishir Bhattacharjee is a Bangladeshi artist. His paintings, critical of the political establishment but always in a satirical fashion, were first seen in the 1980s. His political cartoons appear regularly in daily newspapers in Bangladesh. During the past couple of years, he has produced paintings that appropriate images from Bengali film posters, altered to serve his social and political messages.
Chuknagar massacre was a massacre of Bengali Hindus committed by the Pakistan Army and local collaborators during the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971. The massacre took place on 20 May 1971 at Dumuria in Khulna and it was one of the largest massacres during the war. According to local estimates, between 10,000 and 12,000 people were killed, though the exact number of persons killed in the massacre is not known. Academic Sarmila Bose, in her controversial book. dismisses claims that 10,000 were killed as "unhelpful", and argues that the reported number of attackers could have shot no more than several hundred people before running out of ammunition. The majority of people killed in the massacre were men, although an unknown number of women and children were murdered as well.
Naeem Mohaiemen uses film, photography, installation, and essays to research South Asia's postcolonial markers. His projects on the 1970s revolutionary left explored the role of misrecognition within global solidarity.
Meherjaan is the feature-length début film of Bangladeshi director Rubaiyat Hossain. The film was pulled from theatres due to the hostile response of some segments of the audience after its release in January 2011. Meherjaan claims to be a women's "feminine" re-visiting of the Bangladesh Independence War with Pakistan in 1971, while many feel discomfort with the deconstructive representation of the '71 conflict.
The Golahat massacre was a massacre of 437 emigrating Hindu merchants and businessmen of Marwari ethnicity in Saidpur, East Pakistan on June 13, 1971.
During the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, members of the Pakistani military and Razakar paramilitary force raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women and girls in a systematic campaign of genocidal rape. Bengali Hindu women were especially targeted for rape by the Pakistani Army and its allies, though Bengali Muslim women were raped by Pakistani soldiers as well. Some of these women died in captivity or committed suicide, while others moved from East Pakistan to India.
"Ekbar biday de Ma ghure ashi" is a Bengali patriotic song written by Pitambar Das. This song was composed in honour of Khudiram Bose. This song is still very popular in West Bengal (India), Khudiram Bose is highly revered as a hero in India.
The Bihari minority in Bangladesh were subject to persecution during and after the Bangladesh War of Independence, experiencing widespread discrimination. They largely maintained a pro-Pakistani stance, supported the Pakistan Armed Forces and opposed the independence of Bangladesh and the Bengali language movement of the Bengali Muslims. Biharis faced reprisals from Mukti Bahini and Bengali militias resulting in an estimated death toll ranging from 1,000 to 150,000.
Srinath Raghavan is an Indian historian of contemporary history. He is a professor of history and international relations at Ashoka University, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a visiting senior research fellow at the India Institute of King's College London. He was previously a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, specialising in contemporary and historical aspects of India's foreign and security policies.
Santahar massacre was a massacre of up to 1,000 men, women and children in the railway town of Santahar located in Naogaon District of East Pakistan.
On 27 March 1971, Bengali members of the East Pakistan Rifles (EPR) and East Bengal Regiment (EBR) stationed in the Mymensingh regiment centre revolted against West Pakistani officers and soldiers stationed there, in response to the Pakistani military's crackdown in Dhaka. The Mymensingh Cantonment massacre is one of the many instances of Bengali military personnel mutinying against their West Pakistani colleagues during the opening stages of the Bangladesh Liberation War.